…restricting your hiring to a small geographic region means you’re not getting the best people you can. As an employee, restricting your job search to companies within a reasonable commute means you’re not working for the best company you can. [We] show both employers and employees how they can work together, remotely, from any desk, in any space, in any place, anytime, anywhere.
David Heinemeier Hansson & Jason Fried – Founders of 37Signals
Back in 2010, we asked ourselves a very important question:
“Where did we want to work?“
The answer started us on the road to true location-independent working. We got there in 2012. What this means is a totally flexible approach to work, based on what we deliver and not on where or how many hours we clock up. Practically, this entails the team working from anywhere they fancy.
So far we’ve clocked-up working at home, drop-in offices, meeting rooms, hotels, trains, planes, clients, suppliers, colleagues, cafes, bars, libraries, the park, on boats, on the beach, in the sun, outside in the rain … anywhere we have decent data and nice coffee.
At the same time, we scrapped our formal working week completely and target each teamie to around 25 hours per week. Our team can, then, work pretty much anytime and anywhere. We are no longer tied to the daily commute and office grind-thing. We’ve seen productivity jump over 30%, morale increase, client response times fall and customer satisfaction at an all time high.
Financially, it’s made a dramatic difference to our bottom-line as we don’t need to spend the £50k per annum we used to spend running an office – and critically it allowed the business to scale quickly in 2013 without the headaches of managing office logistics.
We’re proud to be leading this digital nomad way of working and you can read about here or ask us, and we’ll happily go over the various challenges and solutions we came up on this journey.
